Eliot and France, France and Eliot

PREFACE ELIOT AND FRANCE, FRANCE AND ELIOT WILLIAM MARX T. S. Eliot and France: quel sujet! Long after Edward J. H. Greene’s T. S. Eliot et la France (1951), now a classic, and in the wake of Nancy Duvall Hargrove’s recent T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (2009), I am glad that Jayme Stayer and his collaborators have tackled the question once again in this book, for the relationship between Eliot and France is an inexhaustible subject. The French influence on Eliot’s poetry and thought could not be underestimated in any way; it might even be one of the most intense and long-lasting love stories an English-speaking writer ever had with Baudelaire’s country. As far as Eliot and France go then, ça suffit. But what about France and Eliot? What I mean is: what about the way Eliot has been read in the country that influenced him so much? What level of understanding has the poet actually attained in his second literary homeland? Foreign literatures are specific systems more isolated from their neighbors than one might think, and Eliot’s case can reveal the unformulated laws that govern these systems. If the question must be asked in this way, it is because Eliot has not actually been read much in France. Very few books are published about him, and even more worrying, his own works are hardly known at all. If only they were easily available … but they are not. You can find currently in French bookstores a bilingual paperback edition of Eliot’s major poems (with a terribly inaccurate English text) and a children’s edition of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. And that is all, however unbelievable such a scarcity may seem. His shorter poems, his plays, his criticism: none of them are available anymore. Under these conditions it is hardly surprising that for the French, Eliot is but a name, respected if meaningless. A few years ago the French National Library organized a series of lectures on major literary figures of the twentieth century. Typically enough, among the English-speaking T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe xi writers you could find Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Pound, but not Eliot. This seems a sorry fate for an eminent writer who treasured French literature and who worked so hard to make it known in Britain and America. Of course, one would not expect Eliot to enjoy in France the same status he has in English-speaking countries. But why hasn’t he at least the same reputation he possesses in Italy, where new and good editions of his books are published regularly and where he is widely read? The problem of Eliot’s status in France is complex and is bound up with the problem of poetry in general. Since the time of Mallarmé, poetry has become less and less popular in France and is perceived as a plaything for connoisseurs. Achieving success and literary recognition is already a difficult task for a French poet, and still more for a foreigner: in France, where the formal approach to literature is so prevalent, the translation of poetry feels more like a betrayal than in any other country. These suspicions—of recondite verse and of translated poetry—explain in part why Eliot’s contemporaries such as Joyce and Woolf are now largely recognized, while he himself remains in a dim light. He wrote poetry, and they published novels. Moreover, Eliot’s French publisher, Le Seuil, while prestigious enough, is not as famous for poetry as Gallimard: it can boast no easily recognizable poetry series, for example, which is a real drawback for marketing an already unmarketable genre. An Eliot volume in the famous Pléiade collection would do wonders for his reputation certainly, but that collection belongs to Gallimard, and besides, the copyrights would likely fetch a price much too high for the expected readership. It is a catch-22 born of the specific ecosystem that is French letters: the discrepancy between Eliot’s second-rate position in France and his high reputation in the rest of the world is the very thing that will keep him from making any progress in the French publishing business, that is, unless Faber and Faber is willing to negotiate its terms with respect to the peculiarity of the French situation. There is also an aesthetic barrier to cross: from the French point of view, surrealism, which eradicated everything in its way, dominates twentieth-century arts. The French do not always realize that in the 1920s and 30s, there were other ways of writing innovative poetry besides the surrealist way, and that English and American modernism was a particularly productive mode. Some knowledge of Eliot’s contribution to world literature and to literary criticism would be most welcome for rectifying this distorted vision of modernity. xii Preface So Eliot’s problem in France is closely related to the specificities of the history of French poetry. One question remains open nonetheless: why is Eliot’s position in France weaker than Ezra Pound’s, even though Pound was also a modernist poet? You could say, in the first place, that Eliot was not always lucky with his French friends. At the end of the war, they were either dead, like Paul Valéry; politically compromised because of their collaboration with Vichy France, like Ramon Fernandez, who died shortly afterwards; or marginalized in foreign countries, like Saint-John Perse. In the 1940s and 50s, the translators Henri Fluchère and Pierre Leyris proved to be excellent go-betweens, and they were helped along in their work by the aura of Eliot’s Nobel Prize, but they now lack successors. Paradoxical though it may seem, I do not think that Eliot has suffered much from his well-known reactionary stance. As long as a writer shows enough talent, French readers do not care about politics, for they use essentially formalist and aesthetic criteria. One example will suffice to illustrate this point. In the English-speaking world there was much talk recently about Eliot’s anti-Semitism: books were written on the subject, the case was brought into the public arena and occupied The Times Literary Supplement for months and even years. In some respects, the case might be compared with Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s. Yet, rightly or wrongly, French critics have always been prone to dissociate Céline’s literary personality from his real one. However outrageous his anti-Semitic writings are, his central place in the French literary canon has never been seriously challenged. Thus, in 2004 and 2005, Céline’s masterpiece Journey to the End of the Night featured prominently in the program of the national competitive examination designed to recruit the best high school teachers in literature (agrégation). English-speaking critics would find this unbelievable, for if Eliot’s anti-Semitism had been one tenth as blatant as Céline’s, they would not even take the trouble to argue about his case: Eliot would immediately be expelled from the canon, and the case would be closed. While the English literary canon is also a moral one, the French canon is more formalist. In fact, the problem is more religious than political. This is the main difference between Eliot’s and Pound’s cases. Unlike the latter, Eliot’s Christian faith serves as the ground for much of his work. This religious tenor explains, among other things, why he is more famous in Italy. Conversely, French culture is so anticlerical today that few Christian writers can avoid being sidelined, even the most innovative among them, like Joris-Karl Huysmans or Georges Bernanos. (Paul Claudel would probably be an exception, but as a general rule theater people have a soft spot for rituals or anything likely to inspire religious fervor on the stage.) T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe xiii This dismissal has nothing to do with censure, at least not consciously; it is just that most French readers feel uncomfortable with a Christian theme or find it difficult to understand its meaning. The problem of secularism is even more fundamental to Eliot’s case, as it relates to the very idea of literature in France. Indeed, as shown by Marc Fumaroli in Exercices de lecture: de Rabelais à Paul Valéry (2006), the history of French literature from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be summed up in the emergence of a secular power that gradually took the place of the Catholic Church, an evolution that was prepared by the success of the Gallican movement. The culmination of this evolution is, of course, the triumph of the “absolute literature” of the late nineteenth century, a literature that presented itself as a new form of religion: an aesthetic religion. Certainly, we find a similar pattern of evolution in other European countries. In England, for example, Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater provide a very clear illustration of this shift away from religion and towards aestheticism. But it is in France, probably because of the trauma of the Gallican dispute, that literature reached its highest level of autonomy and was considered absolute and inviolable. It is worth noting that the French still live more or less under this ideological regime with all of its consequences, one of them being precisely the inability to conceive of a religious literature or a Christianity that could inform it. In a system where literature plays the role of a new clerisy, pressing literature to Christian ends is seen as nothing less than a betrayal of the religion of literature, because literature is not supposed to worship anything other than itself. Since one cannot serve two masters at the same time, the concept of a Christian literature seems an inherent contradiction to the French mind. These two labels, Christianity and literature, have been antagonistic at least as far back as French writers have struggled against the authority of the Church. For a French reader, Christian writers can only be traitors at best, if not frauds. Since their work refers to a sacredness other than its own, they cannot be taken seriously as writers. The disapproval of any Christian literature has less to do with anticlericalism than with the French overvaluation of literature in the last two centuries. The specific problem encountered by the introduction of Eliot’s work in French literary culture becomes clearer in this context: the religion of literature—to which Eliot was so strongly opposed—cannot tolerate the presence of a religious literature that would necessarily challenge its own foundations. The ultimate paradox, of course, is that Eliot himself was a great admirer of those French Symbolists who did so much to establish a new religion of literature. But what he admitted in foreign writers he could not accept at home—in Arnold, for instance. xiv Preface So there is still much work to be done by Eliot scholars in France. If they propose new readings, if they provide appropriate editions and translations, and moreover, if they work for a paradigm shift in French literature, they might reasonably hope to overcome Eliot’s handicap in France. Is it any wonder, finally, that a poetry such as Eliot’s, which questions more than any other the definition of culture, would reveal the crucial differences that separate literatures from each other? Attending to such divisions is the first step for any critic who wants to reconcile them.